Spirituality

02/16/2016

When I was younger - a lot younger - a previous lifetime, in fact - I spent a lot of time in one of the most famous Buddhist temples in Tibet. At first I mostly just lay around in the sunlight and chased crickets, but after a while I found myself becoming interested in some of the discussions the monks around me were having, in their open-air debates where they would jump around in their robes clapping their hands at key moments. I started hanging out with some of them and got in on some of their discussions. I learned to meditate, and I learned their debating style - where my jumping skills were much admired. While I could not commit to a vegetarian diet (look it up), I fit in with the monks in every other way.

Those were heady days. While we weren’t meditating in silence, we were engaged in heated discussions about the Big Issues: Life, death, free will, identity... I learned more in my years with those monks than in any other period in my lives, before or since. It wasn’t long though, before signs of friction emerged between my group of passionate young monks and the temple’s leadership and the other monks. We were young and we cared about everything very deeply, and so we questioned everything. We viewed the other young monks as more complacent, more concerned with gaining the approval of their teachers and the higher-order monks than with really grappling with these issues, with really discerning what was true.

Eventually, a group of us decided that we would split off and form our own order. This was no easy business, as the Buddhist hierarchy in Tibet is very rigid and adheres to strict rules regarding such things. Our request to establish a new order was declined, and being the rebellious young monks that we were, we took this as confirmation that we must indeed form our own order, by whatever means necessary.

It wasn’t easy. We gathered our meagre belongings and headed to a remote valley where we camped out in an abandoned old monastery. We sought donations from local villagers, who were very generous with food and blankets, and we started our own vegetable garden. They were some of the most difficult years of my life, and yet some of the most rewarding.

After a while though, something started to happen. None of us were immediately aware of it - in fact it is only in hindsight that I can say when I think it began to happen, which I believe was around the time of our first springtime in our new home. We had not yet been there a full year. Looking back, it’s easy to see how it all happened, but when one is in the middle of such things everything is less clear.

What happened was this: Slowly, and over time, those ideas and principles that we had been so eager to explore became less subjects for inquiry and more articles of dogma. This dogma we used against one another in a kind of spiritual one-upmanship wherein all of a sudden maintaining one’s own identity as someone well-learned, even erudite, had become all important.

Our arguments lost their joy and passion for learning, for exploring, for seeking the truth - and became instead a ground for proving oneself, for clinging to one’s territory, for maintaining the unspoken hierarchy that had developed among us. They began to take on the slightest whiff of threat.

In this environment, it was no longer safe to tread out to the very edges of truth and knowledge. What became safe was to repeat what had already been established within the group as “truth.” Better yet, to be the first to articulate it in a new and clever way. This became the new game: How to not only fit in to the group, but fit in in a way that set yourself apart from the others... just not too far apart.

What had happened to our little group was this: We had recreated the same hierarchy and authoritarian structure that we had sought to escape when we left the monastery. And in recreating that hierarchy, we created something that fit very well with that hierarchy: GroupThink.

Of course GroupThink can arise when any number of people come together, hierarchy or not. And our hierarchy was subtle, unspoken. Which perhaps made the power of the group’s opinion all the more threatening. It took a while before I caught on to what was happening. For a long time I didn’t say anything, only tried to comprehend what was going on. But when Yak-Nose (all of the monks had endearing nicknames for each other) was exiled from the group because he had insisted on delving deeper into the true meaning of “kindness”, I had had enough. I packed my things and I left, wary for a very long time of putting in with any kind of group at all.

So what did I learn from this experience? Well, obviously I saw the harm that GroupThink can do, the way it can shut down genuine inquiry, declare certain questions to be out of bounds. I saw the way it halted growth, the way it got people to simply run around in the same circles, expressing the same thoughts, perhaps in different ways but never really expanding their understanding, never stepping into new territory. Perhaps most worrying, I saw how it allowed the members of my group to believe that anything - really, anything - could be considered acceptable, even good and decent, as long as the rest of the group thought it so.

It’s been a long time since I split up with my little group of monks. And I’ve seen my own experience mirrored over and over again over more lifetimes and many decades, in different countries, different times, different circumstances, but often with the same sad phenomenon: That the people living in those countries and those times don’t even realize that they have participated in something ghastly until it is all over.

So what did I learn? I learned about the dangers of letting the group do your thinking for you. But more than that, I learned just how easy it is, how insidiously easy, for the viper that is GroupThink to slip into any group, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how “enlightened.” I’ve learned that any one of us could fall victim to it and perhaps not even be aware that we have stopped thinking until it is too late.

Krishna Purr is a world-renowned spiritual teacher and speaker. One of his early lives was spent in Tibet as a temple cat, and he is the first non-human to have been awarded the “geshe” degree. He left Tibetan Buddhism in his third lifetime, to study Zen Buddhism in Northeastern Japan - which he prefers to Tibetan Buddhism, he says, because “rocks are hard.” He is best known as spiritual advisor to Urban Yogini. Krishna Purr is currently in his fifth or maybe sixth incarnation.

02/15/2016

Stillness isn’t easy. Nobody ever said it was - nobody who practices it anyway. Yet there is a perception in our culture that all the running around we do, the busy-ness, the constant chatter and movement, is what requires effort and work, while things like meditation and mindfulness are “easy.” But what if it is precisely the other way around?

What if it is the sitting in stillness that requires the greatest effort? What if it is resisting - over and over again - the temptations and distractions that are always pulling at us that poses the greatest challenge? What if it is our need to always “do”, to move, to be in constant action, that prevents us from recognizing the truths that are right in front of us, that prevents us from solving the problems we say we are committed to solving - keeping us instead on an endlessly turning merry-go-round of our own frantic pursuit?

Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than during election season. I suppose I have the advantage of a few lifetimes under my belt to give me some perspective, but every four years I see the same thing. Every four years, like some unfortunate variety of mutant locust, they emerge: The enthusiastic voters. Their memories seemingly wiped clean in their brief hibernations, they are certain that this time - this time, mind you - they’ve found a political candidate who will be the answer to their prayers, who will fix all the things the previous candidates messed up, who will really Change Things.

Never mind that the change promised by the last candidate they so enthused over either never materialized or changed things only for the worse. Never mind that with each passing election, the most measurable changes are in the degree of government power over our lives (always greater) and the degree of freedom over our own (always diminished).

Never mind that each of the problems these enthusiastic voters profess to care about so deeply have at their source, state intervention of some kind: The terrorism bred and fueled by military interventions overseas; The astronomical costs of health care in a system practically defined by licensing and regulation - a government-enforced cartel that predictably restricts supply and raises prices; The violent crime engendered by the disastrous War on Drugs; And the almost-routine economic bubbles and crashes that are preceded by government expansion of the money supply.

Never mind that the voting merry-go-round doesn’t offer any non-statist solutions to these problems. That politicians are always and only called upon to act. To “do something!” This is not only the politicians’ fault. It is endemic to our culture: We respect those who are seen to be “doing something”. We respect action. We do not so much respect sitting quietly and contemplating.

But what if politicians “doing something” is itself the problem?

And what if, by continuing to vote for them, by continuing to believe that the way to solve our problems is through the very mechanism that created them, what if those enthusiastic voters are simply enabling the source of our ills? Simply helping to support the machinery that they ought to be tearing down?

What if some of those enthusiastic voters got down from the incessantly turning merry-go-round? What if they just took a little break to stop and sat in the stillness for a while? What if they resisted the urge to constant motion, to always “do something”? Because sometimes, “doing something” only makes things worse. Sometimes, the best course of action is to do nothing.

Krishna Purr is a world-renowned spiritual teacher and speaker. One of his early lives was spent in Tibet as a temple cat, and he is the first non-human to have been awarded the “geshe” degree. He left Tibetan Buddhism in his third lifetime, to study Zen Buddhism in Northeastern Japan - which he prefers to Tibetan Buddhism, he says, because “rocks are hard.” He is best known as spiritual advisor to Urban Yogini. Krishna Purr is currently in his fifth or maybe sixth incarnation.

This is the website for everything Urban Yogini: T-shirts, paraphernalia, and of course the book. I'm Krishna Purr, spiritual advisor to the Superhero Who Can't Use Violence, and I'll be blogging about her goings-on, special deals and events, and my own unique take on world events related to peace and violence. Stay tuned!